Will We Be What We Have Been

Charles Krauthammer refreshes our memories regarding one of the greatest feats of liberation in the history of world civilization. We refer to the victory over the exceedingly repressive regime imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Krauthammer writes that:

In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys.

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure - a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora.

The liberation of Afghanistan is quite literally an astonishing feat, one that could not have been accomplished apart from force of arms, a fact that those on the left who say that war never settled anything might do well to ponder. Nor could it have been accomplished without extraordinary leadership from the Commander-in-Chief on down. It is almost impossible to imagine this achievement, for which Americans should be extremely proud, having occured under a Kerry administration. Senator Kerry's whole approach to terrorism and his disdain for the military make an expedition such as the Bush team put together in Afghanistan quite unthinkable under a President Kerry.

Krauthammer's essay, which has a lot more to say than the excerpts quoted above, implicitly reminds us of how much is at stake in tomorrow's election. Tomorrow we will decide what kind of nation we will be for the next decade. Will we continue to be the hope of oppressed peoples everywhere as we were under Ronald Reagan and as we have been under George Bush or will we be a nation fashioned after the image of Michael Moore? Will we continue to be the hope of those who live in fear of Islamo-terrorism as we have been under George Bush or will we withdraw from the fray and become a reactive force, as John Kerry has suggested he prefers, rather than the proactive force we have been under President Bush? Will we continue to be a nation that does what is right even if others refuse to join us or will we be a nation which must pass John Kerry's "global test", i.e. get approval from the French, before we can act to oppose terrorism and other threats against our security? Will we be a nation whose president has the endorsement of most of the world's worst tyrants and anti-semites, will we be a nation whose president is the man Osama Bin Laden has recently tacitly endorsed, or will we be a nation whose president is a threat to tyrants and terrorists everywhere? We'll know in thirty six hours.